by Lifeguard of Love
Right now I am mad at Spinanes. I am mad at Arches and Aisles for being music for by and about grown ups. I am mad at the cool, collected resign that Rebecca Gates shows her lovers. These are no adolescent love songs, no lyrics like “I’m a square/And that makes you giddy. Did you give up punk/for Lent?” No, this is all vodka on ice (what a grown-up drink), pulling your clothes off and getting it over with (what a grown-up way to make love).
Arches and Aisles
opens with a song that wants to be an adolescent love song, the lover meeting
the beloved on the West Coast. This is a song about adult lovers who think
they’re in love “like kids again” but they won’t ever know what it’s like to be
in love like a kid again. It’s all going to hell.
It’s still a great record.
It’s still a great record.
*
At Pike Place Market, my family walks by the Sub Pop retail
outlet. I don’t remember if I say anything or if my mom just knows I’ve been
checking out all the Kurt Cobain biographies from the library, learning about
the “grunge” scene which I just missed by being a teenager in the late-90s. Here,
I have the first of a lifetime of
overwhelming record store experiences. My mom convinces me to buy the
“sampler”, because it is cheap and you get two CDs.
Upon the first listen, which is also my first time listening
to “indie rock” (except for that one time I heard Sleater-Kinney’s “Little
Babies” on the radio), I am struck by the difference in production, noticeable
in the sound. It’s warm but the vocals sound way back. This is what indie rock sounds like, I realize.
My favorite songs are the two songs by Spinanes, “Greetings
from the Sugar Lick” and “Reach vs. Speed.” I think the singer is a soft-voiced
male; no maybe it’s a woman, I can’t tell.
*
Arches and Aisles
is on the Employee Picks shelf at CD Recyclery in Gurnee Mills Outlet Mall,
Gurnee Illinois. It’s the band from the Sub Pop Sampler. The cover is a
mystery*. It is black and white dogwood flowers. The band name and album title
are in sans serif font in a dark, transluscent magenta on a clear sticker on
the cellophane; once the album is opened the title and band name are removed.
It is the best graphic design I am aware of.
*
My friend gets a mixtape from someone in California. The
first song is by Spinanes, I can tell right away. It’s the one about the West
Coast weather.
*
When I move into the dorms at The Evergreen State College, I
live with four other girls. Our names are Uliina, Alicia, Aloka, and Alyssa,
and one other girl with a name that doesn’t start with a vowel and end with an
“uh” sound, like Nicole or something. I don’t remember. She is into “boffing”**
and Ren Faire and sci fi or whatever and invites me to eat dinner with her,
once. It was just noodles with butter and brown sugar. It was the worst thing
I’ve ever eaten.
Alyssa has dreads and dates a boy that went to my high
school who I thought was super cool. She tells me a story about how he works at
Subway and once someone smeared poop inside the paper towel holder. We get
along well and get high together well but are too shy to become good friends.
Alicia and Aloka are exceedingly boring and I can’t believe
my foul luck, to live with the least interesting people at a school full of
hippies, punks, queers, rejects and weirdos. Every morning, and I mean every
morning, they listen to – no, blast –
“You’re Makin’ Me High” by Toni Braxton, one of my least favorite Top 40
R&B jams of my early years of high school, while they do their hair and
makeup. If they go “out” in the evening,
they listen to it again. And again and again, on repeat. In revolt, I play Surrealistic Pillow on my dad’s warped
LP from the 60s. It seems to be the music most directly opposed to Toni
Braxton. Then I find Arches and Aisles
at a used CD store. I’d never actually had the whole album. It was equally good
for opposing Toni Braxton.
On Thanksgiving Break I go visit my femme girlfriend who
lives in Colorado. November in Colorado is brown, which totally weirds me out.
I’ve only spent Novembers before and since in Washington, you know, The
Evergreen State. I talk about the Spinanes and she says, Jody Bleyle calls them
Spinoidle, and plays me the Team Dresch song where Jody Bleyle says that.
I only live in the dorm for one quarter. Then I moved in
with the only other person I knew who listened to Spinanes: Slim Volume.
*
“This is how heaven sounds when you get there” he says, at
the beginning of side B. He has Arches
and Aisles on LP and he got it in Evanston Illinois, what the fuck is up
with Spinanes and Illinois? Shortly before we fall in love, he lends the LP to
this friend who never gives it back and eventually moves away.
*the only album cover that is more mysterious is Moon Pix by Cat Power
**You know, where nerds attack each other with big hammers
made out of duct tape and styrofoam.
